If I am to visit a tourist honeypot, then a cold, grey, damp day in February is my preference. (“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” – pah!) Ease of getting there and a mild curiosity took me to Haworth, and, once there, it was interesting to have a sense of the physicality of the sisters’ lives. The house was a good size – but one room was reserved for their father’s study, and at one point they were a family of eight plus a servant. The church and churchyard tombstones a constant view from the front. That hill and the demands it made on tubercular lungs. The Sunday School over the way founded by their father and where they taught. The pub where Branwell drank a stone’s throw away, the stationer’s where they bought paper. They wrote with quills – of course! But it had never occurred to me. The tiny handwriting I had wondered at – but of course! Every bit of paper had to be bought and they were not rich. The table that they walked around in long dresses discussing their work.

I thought too of how, at an impressionable age, you can learn something from even a rubbish teacher (yes, Dolly Duncan, I mean you). The cupboard in her room full of copies of Jane Eyre and a lesson about the family – which may well have culminated in us having to draw the parsonage – when I first learned how to pronounce Keighley. The 50-odd years melted away.